[20.04 Cupertino] Plank Background Color?

Support & Help Requests
#1

Escaping from an old Mac, I'm greatly enjoying 20.04 with Cupertino and all my tweaks that take it vastly beyond what the Apple cage permits. One little tweak I'd like to make, is adding the same light blue semi-transparent background for the Plank "dock" that I have on the top Panel. Some of the Plank icons are quite dark (e.g. Shotcut) and are over a very dark part of my chosen Desktop Background. Since it's surely quite difficult to add a light edge around any dark icons, maybe a background for Plank could be a quick fix?

I haven't found an option in Mate Tweaks -> Panel. Being perhaps more brave than warranted I also looked with dconf Editor and don't see anything there either. Is there a hack, or some plan to add a Background option? If not, no worries since I can either choose another Desktop Background or tweak the one I have with an image editor.

1 Like
#2

I also tried to find something about this on Plank (right click on its icon) -> Preferences, and it seems that characteristics like background color is not an option.

But I find that Plank is "themeable", so you can choose a ready made theme on Mate Look -> Plank Themes ( https://www.mate-look.org/browse/cat/273/ ) or build a new one from scratch or based on an existing theme.

Then, just install your theme on /usr/share/plank/themes or ~/.local/share/plank/themes/ and it should appear as an option on the theme list.

2 Likes
#3

Thanks. I'll check into that. :slightly_smiling_face:
I'm happy to be comfy enough to use Mate/Cupertino as-is and have options for making it even better going forward. :+1:

1 Like
#4

OK, so thanks to your kindness in tactfully pointing out there are Plank Themes (doh!), I found The Cupertino Effect inGrey Cupertino Series thinking it would give a light gray background as a starting point. I downloaded & extracted, and put its folder with theme in home/.local/share/Plank/themes/The Cupertino Effect inGrey Extend Edition, clicked the Plank item atop the dock and chose Appearance -> Theme -> The Cupertino... and it instantly changed. Many things were different, including too much spacing between icons. Alas, no light gray background as hoped.

Now having learned there are already choices built into the default Plank installation, I tried out Matte. Cool! Light gray background, small icon spacing, and even a thin line delineating the background border. My darkest icons (e.g. Gimp) now show up a little better. Now I'd like to tweak that a little to make it a lighter shade and shift toward the blue I chose for the top panel. I was glad to see that the inGrey theme is in plain text, saw no Matte theme in the home subfolder the new theme went in.

Searching the root directory I found this tiny 113 byte file:
/usr/share/plank/themes/Matte/dock.theme

All it contains is:

[PlankTheme]
[PlankDockTheme]
HorizPadding=1
TopPadding=1.5
BottomPadding=2
IconShadowSize=0
CascadeHide=false

So I had a look at the other subdirectories in its parent themes directory, and lo the other three directories each have their own dock.theme file. The directory named Default has one that's 2.7k, and the one in Ubuntu-MATE is 2.6k. So guessing those contain the nuts and bolts, I backed them up and changed some RGB values to try for a blue shift. Couldn't change the way Matte looks, so I restored the originals and happily went with that theme as-is. Based on the two top lines in the Matte theme maybe those are files to find, backup and modify? No time to mess with it more right now, but will post an update if/when I come up with anything. Maybe I'll even try to find and read some directions on how to proceed. Perhaps there's info on how to create a theme based on Matte, with just minor mod of fill color & transparency so it will match the Panel.

I just love how slick, open and configurable Mate Cupertino is! To have such a friendly and helpful support community makes Mate even more delicious. :smile:

2 Likes